As a first-year PhD student in the lab of Agnès Banreti, Asma is working to understand the mechanisms active in maintaining homochirality in biological systems and how chirality repair mechanisms affect disease onset and progression.

During her first PhD club talk, she addressed the concept of chirality and its existence across scales – from small molecules to biological structures and even galaxies. She delved into how recent studies are challenging the ‘homochirality dogma’ in biology – proteins have been found to undergo amino-acid epimerization over time, especially correlating with ageing and specific pathologies.

If you want to dive further into biological homochirality and discover Asma’s presentation, it is available on the IBV common server.

(By Asma Merzougui and Sreeparvathy Edachola)